Recently, the pay phone celebrated its one-hundredth birthday. It was invented by William Gray, and was first installed in a Hartford, Conn. bank in 1889. Although pay telephone stations preceded the invention of the pay phone, there was a big difference between the two; pay telephone stations relied on an attendant being present to collect money after a patron made a call--some attendants went so far as to lock the patron in the booths so he couldn't leave without paying. Today, with an estimated 1.8 million pay phones in service nationwide, long-distance calling from pay phones has grown to be a $2 billion-a-year industry. Indeed, in 1989, Americans made more than 850 million long-distance calls from pay phones--many of them fraudulently.
Coin telephone stations are the frequent target of vandalism and theft--possibly due to a lack of funds or the larcenous belief that it is acceptable to take something without giving something of comparable value in return. Although pay phones have been engineered to provide reliable service during environmental extremes, there is still a need to improve their resilience to the ever-evolving destructive efforts of their "patrons." Periodically, new techniques emerge for obtaining free telephone calls such as attaching a thread to the coin for later retrieval; but when they fail, frustration is vented by reverting to known and reliable acts of mischief. One recurrent activity is stuffing the coin entrance with various materials; either to preclude less destructive patrons from using the pay phone or to punish the phone for failing to recognize sticks, matchbook covers and the like as legitimate currency.
Coin telephone stations usually come equipped with a coin ejector which includes an actuator (return lever) plus appropriate linkage and other cooperating parts that enlarge the coin path in order to release trapped material into a return chute. Frequently, trapped material does not fall into the return chute so additional force is applied to the actuator which frequently results in damage to its linkage--thus adding insult to injury. It is therefore desirable to assure that trapped coins and other material will fall into the return chute when the actuator is operated, and to assure that the linkage will not be damaged when excessive force is applied.
It was only a short time after the first pay phone was put into service that the need arose for a coin ejector to prevent clogging of coin chutes from paper or like substances. Apparently coin chutes evoke a fundamental human need to subdue nature (and machines) through acts of cunning and trickery. In an attempt to foil such behavior U.S. Pat. No. 638,967 was issued to O. & A. Jaeger on Dec. 12, 1899 which discloses an ejector having movable sidewalls along a coin guideway. One sidewall moves to push out material trapped in the guideway in response to the operation of a coin ejector. Unfortunately this ejector has limited functionality and does nothing to discourage stuffing of the coin chute, or to prevent damage when the coin ejector is forcefully operated.